Warning: This article contains spoilers about Jurassic World Rebirth.
Jurassic World Rebirth screenwriter David Koepp may have actively worked to not feature so many callouts in the film to previous installments of the franchise, but director Gareth Edwards? Not so much.
“It’s funny, you spend your life as a filmmaker trying not to copy your heroes, and it just keeps happening,” Edwards tells Entertainment Weekly.
Rebirth, the seventh Jurassic movie (in theaters now), is littered with Easter eggs and visual callbacks to past entries — some more overt than others. There are also references to past works of Steven Spielberg; Edwards points out a Back to the Future magazine is sitting in the gas station where the Delgados are hunted by Mutadons.
“At one point we got told to dial them down, to be honest,” he recalls. “Frank Marshall [producer], David Koepp, Steven Spielberg, they’ve all been involved in a lot of those films that we’re referencing. They would be the three that would be like, ‘Stop being so referential. This is your movie, go do your own thing.’ But you’re probably the three people in the world that can’t fully appreciate how amazing all these other films are because you made them. As someone who’s a fan of those films, I get a kick out of this.”
Here are 15 of those Jurassic Park-specific callbacks that can be seen in Jurassic World Rebirth.
Rupert Friend’s side mirror
When we first meet Rupert Friend‘s Martin Krebs, the Big Pharma representative looking to hire “situational security” expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to assemble a team and retrieve dinosaur DNA, the camera zooms in for a close-up of his reflection in his car’s side mirror. It reads “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”
A famous scene from 1993’s Jurassic Park features a similar side-mirror close-up as Laura Dern‘s Ellie Sattler, Jeff Goldblum‘s Ian Malcolm, and Bob Peck’s Robert Muldoon flee from a stampeding T. rex in their Jeep.
Edwards reveals he originally shot a scene featuring the side-mirror bit for the end of the film when Martin is driving away from the Mutadons in a Jeep. “It got cut out,” the director says, but notes, “It’s on the DVD extras, a very short moment.”
“I was like, ‘I’m not gonna get that gag in, am I?'” he recalls. “So then when we went to New York, it was the last thing we filmed in the whole movie, as we scouted, I just said to the person who provides the vehicles, ‘Is there any way you could just get the “objects appear closer” on the wing mirror?'”
A familiar banner
Jonathan Bailey‘s introduction as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis comes when Zora and Martin find him in the nearby museum. A black banner with red and white lettering descends behind a dinosaur skeleton exhibit.
One of the most famous scenes from Jurassic Park is a shot from the ending of a T. rex roaring in the destroyed theme park lobby as a banner with the same color scheme and typography falls to the ground.
That Alan Grant callout
Traversing through the dino-infested jungles of Ile Saint-Hubert, Henry mentions that he studied under Dr. Alan Grant, the character Sam Neill played across three movies in the Jurassic franchise, starting with the flagship film.
Edwards shares with EW how the team added subtle Easter eggs to Bailey’s Henry to enhance this connection. “I designed a little patch that went on his bag that was the Snakewater canyon,” he says, referring to the fossil dig site from the opening of Jurassic Park. “It was as if it was a national park badge of that dig site, as if [Henry] had worked there as a kid.”
Costume designer Sammy Sheldon Differ then noticed a triangular piece of metal on Alan’s belt in that first movie. “It’s a digging sort of spade,” Edwards says. “You just open it and it’s for scratching away at the dirt and stuff. We had that on Jonathan’s belt. We liked the idea that Alan Grant had given it to him as a gift when he retired, or whatever the canon would be.”
A Michael Crichton line of dialogue
Koepp pulled a line of dialogue from Michael Crichton‘s books and gave it to Bailey’s Henry. “Which is, ‘You used technology to bring back something from 65 million years ago, but it’s a different planet,'” Koepp paraphrases. “The oxygen levels are different, solar radiation is different, the temperatures are different, everything is different about it. What makes you think that it’s all going to go fine?”
A raptor strikes a pose
Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono), Teresa Delgado’s (Luna Blaise) stoner boyfriend, wanders off to take a leak. With his back turned, a raptor strikes a familiar and terrifying pose (one featured many times through the Jurassic films) as it prepares to pounce on him. The scene takes a turn when a Mutadon (a mutant raptor-pterosaur hybrid) snatches the raptor before it can carry out the deed.
Recreating that brachiosaurus moment
Zora’s team walks into an open field of tall grass where they stumble upon two Titanosaurs mid mating ritual. They all gaze up in wonder and awe, trigging John Williams‘ classic Jurassic Park theme music.
It’s a very similar scene to the first film, with the same music, when Neill’s Alan and Dern’s Ellie stare gobsmacked at the sight of a living brachiosaurus eating leaves from the top of a tree.
Tree naps
The Delgado family takes a rest in the jungle. Teresa and her little sister Isabella (Audrina Miranda) take a snooze as they rest their heads against their dad, Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), who’s sitting on the ground, resting his back against a thick tree root.
Alan has a similar moment with Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards) in Jurassic Park. The trio takes a snooze just before a veggie-eating dinosaur comes looking for snacks in their tree.
T. rex vs. raft
A scene from Crichton’s first novel involving a raft and a swimming T. rex was cut from Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, but Koepp, who also co-wrote that film with the author, revisited the material for Jurassic World Rebirth. In the book, it’s Alan and the two kids traveling downriver en route to the visitor center when they encounter the gargantuan predator. In the new film, it’s the Delgado family attempting to flee a T. rex.
Swinging with ropes
After extracting DNA from the egg of a baby Quetzalcoatlus, Henry drops the syringe, which teeters on the edge of the mountain side. To get it, the paleontologist, dangling from Zora’s rope, attempts multiple times to swing himself along the rocks to grab it.
The sequence visually calls back to Alan’s desperate moment in Jurassic Park where he attempts to swing himself out of harm’s way on a rope before an attacking T. rex can push a Jeep on top of them.
Dinosaurs hit a gas station
There are multiple moments in 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park involving the combination of a gas station and a dinosaur: on Isla Sorna when Goldblum’s Ian & Co. encounter raptors, and later in the film, when a T. rex pokes its head at a station in San Diego.
In Jurassic World Rebirth, it’s a group of Mutadons that terrorize the Delgados and Zora’s remaining team at an abandoned gas station on Ile Saint-Hubert.
Edwards actually takes credit for the gas station scene, which was a different location in the original script. “My first movie at film school, my graduation film, was set in a gas station with creatures,” he explains. “I loved American movies, and in England, nothing feels like America at all apart from a gas station…. Then my first movie, Monsters, this low-budget film set in Central America, the third act is at a gas station. Then I started getting paranoid. ‘Do I just not have any other ideas?'”
A different kind of raptor hunts in the aisles
Fleeing the Mutadons, the Delgados take refuge in the convenience store attached to the gas station. Isabella and her dino pal, Dolores, hide in the freezer, causing a Mutadon to get confused by seeing its own reflection in the glass. The creature then stalks the family as they hide among the aisles.
Tim and Lex were similarly hunted by raptors in the kitchen of the theme park’s managerial offices on Isla Nublar during the events of Jurassic Park. A Mutadon is also a hybrid of a raptor and a pterosaur, further emphasizing the similarities between the two films.
“I wanted a moment like that in our film,” Edwards says. “I was trying to find an excuse, and I was wondering what it could be. I ended up doing the gas station. You feel like you’re going to have to refuel these cars. Once you get in there, you’re trying to think of any gags you can. I liked this idea of reflections. At one point, I wanted it to be flooded, and then I started going, ‘This is a bit too straightforward.’ Then the production designer and the art department built all that refrigerator stuff. When I looked at the set, I thought, ‘Well, that’s a great hiding place.'”
Mahershala Ali’s Jeff Goldblum moment
To help the others get away from the Distortus rex, Mahershala Ali‘s Duncan Kincaid waves a red flare at the monster as a distraction. The D. rex attacks and for a moment, it’s presumed Duncan didn’t survive, but he’s later recovered floating in the river.
This might as well be his Jeff Goldblum moment. As Ian in Jurassic Park, the actor waves a red flare at the T. rex in a misguided attempt to help the others escape. The dinosaur leaves him gravely injured, but Dern’s Ellie later finds him alive among the wreckage.
Rupert Friend’s ‘Lost World’ moment
Koepp points to another moment from Crichton’s books that made its way into the script for Jurassic World Rebirth. He cites The Lost World, where a Jeep careens down a mountain as raptors attack. “I use bits of that,” he says. “There’s a Jeep careening down a mountain [in Rebirth] and menaced by, at first, a Mutadon.”
That would be Martin’s vehicle, though his escape plan backfires when he finds himself in the clutches of the D. rex.
Pelican T-shirt
A big Easter egg that calls back to Jurassic Park has been staring us down the entire time. Isabella Delgado sports a T-shirt that features a pelican. “It’s the same breed at the end of Jurassic Park,” Edwards confirms to EW, referring to the flying pelican scene at the very end of that movie. “And in Spanish it says, ‘Life finds a way,’ but it’s an old T-shirt, so you don’t really notice, hopefully.”
Dolphins
Speaking of pelicans…dolphins are the new pelicans. The end of Jurassic World Rebirth ends in a similar manner as the first film, only instead of the survivors gazing out peacefully from their helicopter at a flock of pelicans, they are looking at a pod of jumping dolphins from their boat.
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